


Iron Iris

by notthelasttime



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Growing Up, World of Ruin, Zine: Full Bloom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:41:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21926134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notthelasttime/pseuds/notthelasttime
Summary: In the middle of a slow-moving apocalypse and a world gone dark, Iris does what she can.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19
Collections: Full Bloom Zine (Final Fantasy XV)





	Iron Iris

**Author's Note:**

> an additional contribution to [full bloom zine](https://twitter.com/fullbloomzine)'s digital bouqlet!

There were things worse than the apocalypse.

Iris was sure of it. There had to be, right? Like things worse than your entire home and family and life and  _ world _ being upheaved, crushed, flipped upside down? Worse than being caged in a steaming city while your brother got to run off playing hero, slaying daemons, and patting you on the head, telling you to stay home and be good?

Surely, there were worse things.   
So Iris did what she could.

Not because it was what her brother had told her to do, with a tight grin and a squeeze to her shoulder. In fact, if she could avoid doing anything Gladdy said to, she usually did, just to spite him for always treating her like a kid. She was not a child anymore and there was no changing that, but now was not the time for petty sibling arguments to get in the way of actually helping people. At least, that’s what she thought while setting up shop in Lestallum, selling odds and ends while putting her sewing skills to practical use, all her funds going towards the  _ efforts _ . Not war efforts—Niflheim and Lucis quiet for once—but only because they were all too busy fighting for their lives in a dying world. Survival was difficult enough without nations decimating each other, and if the rumors she heard passing on the streets could be believed, then there wasn’t much left of the Empire anyway.

_ It’s what Noctis would want _ .

The words were never said, but they lingered when she spoke to her brother and they looked at the state of the world, and all the tiny inconsequential things Iris did to try and help.  _ Chin up, do what you can. Help the others, it’s what Noct would want _ . Well, Prince Noctis wasn’t there, but even Iris could admit through bitterness that it was probably true. Childish crushes aside, her feelings towards him were always warm. He’d been kind to her, humored her silly infatuation, and that meant something. It made a world of a difference to her, helped tip and skew the world into something a little more manageable after Insomnia had fallen. Noctis had always been kind to her, never mocking, gentle with his words and…

_ Flowers _ … she thought, staring at those strained faces and looking for a light in the dark, something to hold on to.

_ Noctis brought me flowers _ .

* * *

Talcott was easy enough to convince.

He was getting older now, like they all were, but it was easy to forget in the day to day, accustomed to the constant changes so that it never really registered. His growing height, the loss of baby fat from his face, and while his old curiosity was never quenched, there was maturity to him now, more than the childish wonder he’d once had for chasing myths and legends.

Iris often thought she’d like to protect him from this. It wasn’t right for a child to have to live through what he did, to have to grow up in a world gone dark, but she couldn’t dwell on that for too long or she’d become dangerously sympathetic to her brother’s way of thinking.

The problem with the whole apocalyptic-impending-doom-thing was that resources were tight. All of them─everywhere she turned and any where she looked. Space, food, clothes, light… electricity to keep the daemons at bay, no sun in the sky impacting the rest of them in more ways than she could count. 

They were figuring things out, a slow trial and error that was enough to keep Iris biting at her nails when she thought about it all. Lestallum was better off than most. They had the power plant to rely on, even if space was a luxury when they were all living on top of each other. They could always build up, and build up they did, improvised rooftop greenhouses, covered and cast in constant floodlights to keep the daemons away. Iris had found out early on that greenhouse work was not necessarily her forte. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the enthusiasm for it─Iris had an abundance of that─but she had been more fond of staring wide-eyed at the plants and getting excited with every new leaf and sprout, every centimeter of growth out of the ground. She’d been shooed out and deemed too easily distracted, and back to her shop on the streets she went. Iris heard more rumors that way, and got to talk to more people, but looking at all those hollow faces, coming back from being outside their protective walls took its own sort of toll.

It also gave her an idea.

In the makeshift greenhouse shed there was a broken grow lamp. Stashed and buried among other things that fell apart and stopped working, things that were saved, recycled, repurposed. Things changed when you knew you couldn’t just buy a new one. No one had gotten around to fixing the light and it had been lost for long enough that when Iris made a casual visit to the greenhouse to stop in and say hello to the friends she’d made there, no one noticed when the broken light disappeared with her when she walked out the door.

“You’re probably going to get us in trouble for this, you know.”

Talcott was sitting on the living room floor, broken grow lamp picked apart and all the spare parts he’d brought over littering the floor around him. Cid probably could have fixed it quicker, but Iris didn’t want to get scolded for stealing, or have him tell  _ her brother _ what her sticky hands had been up to. Talcott was a smart kid, always had been, and for all his moaning and groaning, he never could say no when she asked for a favor.

“Nobody’s even noticed it’s missing,” Iris said as she paced, bouncing on the balls of her feet. The apartment was empty, as it often was, even with it being shared by too many people. They were always coming and going, off again on another hunt as soon as they came.

Leaving her behind.

“And when you’re suddenly growing plants without a greenhouse? What then?”

Talcott raised an eyebrow, punctuating the drama of his statement by flicking the switch and flooding the room with a glow of light. Iris grinned.

“Then I pretend I don’t know what anyone’s suspicious about and I keep your name out of it.”

* * *

Lestallum was a central hub, a flood of activity and trading, of gear and weapons and supplies, of food and rumors all alike. Iris kept her eyes and ears open, hearing it all. Sweet smiles on her face while she asked the passing hunters what they found as they poked around her shop. Sometimes they gave her odds and ends, fabric that could be repurposed, traded their loot for a new shirt, or holes patched in their pants. Sometimes they gave her things, if it was useless enough and if she showed curiosity. Lost dolls, blue glass bottles, or old black and white photographs that she found charming. Things worth saving─even if Iris was the only one that thought so.

“You ever find any flowers out there?” she’d ask, oh so sweetly because she knew that they all saw innocent Iris, no ulterior motives underneath the surface.

_ No _ , was the general reply, in more words or less.

“Not much grows out there anymore kiddo,” one of the hunters told her, paying for a new pair of boots, “it’s a nice thought, though. Wouldn’t mind seeing some again.”

Iris gave him his change and she kept asking.

A brown canvas bag brushed with dirt was plopped down in her hand when she told one of the regulars his total. She looked at him, he looked at her and said, “You’re the only one I know that’d want something like this.”

When she curiously untied the top and peeked in, Iris couldn’t help but smile.

“ _ Where? _ And-” she pulled a bulb out of the bag, a little small, a little shriveled, but given some light and water, it just might… “What kind?”

“No idea,” he said, “You’ll have to plant them and find out. As for where…” he picked up his things and gave Iris a conspiratorial wink, “that’s my little secret.”

Three weeks later, after no small amount of agonizing over how much water and how much light, after scrounging up containers to serve as pots and dirt that didn’t seem  _ too _ terribly rocky, after keeping the grow light in the corner of her shared bedroom, hidden as much as she could manage, Iris woke to a tiny green sprout.

* * *

The Marshall’s presence didn’t bode well. But while she knew he could be intimidating, for Iris it was hard to be scared of a man that used to stick her on his shoulders for walks around the Citadel gardens. So she gathered her courage with a pleasant smile on her face, and Iris walked up to where he was waiting at her stand, a bundle of Anemone in her arms.

“Morning Marshall! Didn’t know you were back in the city.” There was a bounce in her step as she opened up shop, aggressively oblivious to anything Cor’s visit might signify.  _ Win them with honey and sugar _ , Iris thought.  _ Win them with flowers. _

“Iris,” Cor said in way of greeting, stern expression on his face, watching Iris pull back the tarp she’d covered her displays with.

“I heard you’d been doing some expanding,” he said as Iris stuck her Anemone in tin cans and mason jars of water, and Cor gestured as she worked, “I thought I would come and see for myself.”

“10 gil each,” Iris said, stunning smile stretched wide and maybe a little too heavy on the cheer. “A gift for a special someone, Marshall? You know flowers’ll brighten anyone’s mood.”

Between his forefinger and thumb, the Marshall plucked up a stem, purple leaves, streaks of blue, staring at it as he said, “Funny, a grow light seems to have gone missing from one of the greenhouses. You wouldn’t know anything about that now, would you Iris?”

With a frozen smile stuck stiff on her face, icy blue eyes pinning her, she knew that  _ Cor _ knew every little secret she’d ever had, and she thought maybe adulthood meant finally understanding why the Immortal was so terrifying.

She gave a shaky little laugh and said, “What? No of course not.”

“ _ Iris _ …”

“Ugh, fine.  _ Fine _ .” She threw her hands up in defeat and let out a long sigh. “It was me. I’ll…” she gave a look of longing to the flowers speckling her shop, and when she spoke again her voice was quiet. “I’ll give it back to the greenhouse. It can go back to being useful. It was a stupid idea in the first place.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Marshall tilting his head, flower still held in his hand. She was about to request that  _ at least _ Gladdy be kept out of this, when she heard him say, “Keep it.”

Frowning, Iris looked back up at him, as he spun the stem of the flower.

“Word’s been getting around Iris. People are talking about the girl with the flowers in Lestallum, and they’ve been looking forward to coming back to the city and see for themselves. There aren’t many flowers left out in the world these days.”

“But-”

“It’s not stupid. Keep growing your flowers, Iris.”

* * *

There were things worse than the apocalypse. 

This Iris knew to be a fact. There could be a world without hope, a world without smiles. Things were hard and they would keep getting harder, but Iris did what she could. She grew flowers. And these days something like that was enough to make the world keep turning, because a world without flowers wasn’t much a world worth living in at all.


End file.
